Imagination and Convention

Distinguishing Grammar and Inference in Language

Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone

Offers a trenchant critique of leading theories of the relation between semantics and pragmatics

Informed by empirical study of a wide range of linguistic phenomena

Draws together philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science

Imagination and Convention

Distinguishing Grammar and Inference in Language

Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone

Description

What do speakers mean? What do they convey? What do they reveal? How do they invite us to think? Communication exploits conventional rules, deliberate choices, and many other faculties. How? A common answer invokes simple meanings and general ways to reinterpret them, as in H. P. Grice's theory of conversational implicature. Lepore and Stone show such answers are unsatisfactory. Instead, they argue that language provides diverse tools for making ideas public, and that communication recruits distinct kinds of imagination. The work synthesizes results from across cognitive science into a profoundly new account of meaning in language.

Imagination and Convention

Distinguishing Grammar and Inference in Language

Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone

Author Information

Ernie Lepore is Board of Governors, Professor of Philosophy and an Acting Director of the Center for Cognitive Science at Rutgers.

Matthew Stone is Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Center for Cognitive Science at Rutgers.

Imagination and Convention

Distinguishing Grammar and Inference in Language

Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone

Reviews and Awards

"Lepore and Stone's articulation of direct intentionalism offers a strategy for combining into a unified theory both fundamental philosophical theories concerning the nature of intentions and cooperative activity and empirical theories in linguistics and cognitive science concerning the particular mechanism of natural languages. This is a significant accomplishment.... I wholeheartedly recommend their book for anyone interested in the relationship between conventional meaning and cooperative rational action and the attendant issue of how to understand the relationship between pragmatics and semantics." - Lenny Clapp, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews